Surviving the Peace: The Struggle for Postwar Recovery in Bosnia-Herzegovina

By Peter Lippman

Surviving the Peace is a monumental feat of ground-level reporting describing two decades of postwar life in Bosnia, specifically among those fighting for refugee rights of return. Unique in its breadth and profoundly humanitarian in its focus, Surviving the Peace situates digestible explanations of the region's bewilderingly complex recent history among interviews, conversations, and tableaus from the lives of everyday Bosnians attempting to make sense of what passes for normal in a postwar society.

Essential reading for students of the former Yugoslavia and anyone interested in postwar or post-genocide studies, Surviving the Peace is an instant classic of long-form reporting, an impossible accomplishment without a lifetime of dedication to a place and people.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9780826522634

Peter Lippman

Peter Lippman, born in Seattle, is a journalist and human rights activist. A fascination with the ethnography of southeast Europe led him to Yugoslavia in the early 1980s. He lived and worked in Bosnia-Herzegovina for two years after the war, and has returned many times since then. Over more than two decades, he has closely followed the efforts of grassroots activists to return to their prewar homes, to fight corruption and discrimination, and to regain their rights.

Book preview

SURVIVING THE PEACE

Peter Lippman

Surviving the Peace

THE STRUGGLE FOR POSTWAR RECOVERY IN BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA

VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY PRESS

Nashville

© 2019 by Vanderbilt University Press

Nashville, Tennessee 37235

All rights reserved

First printing 2019

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lippman, Peter, 1952– author.

Title: Surviving the peace : the struggle for postwar recovery in Bosnia-Herzegovina / Peter Lippman.

Description: Nashville, Tennessee : Vanderbilt University Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2019009076 (print) | LCCN 2019014183 (ebook) | ISBN 9780826522634 (ebook) | ISBN 9780826522610 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Bosnia and Herzegovina—History—1992– | Bosnia and Herzegovina—Social conditions. | Bosnia and Herzegovina—Politics and government—1992– | Peace-building—Bosnia and Herzegovina. | Human rights—Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Classification: LCC DR1750 (ebook) | LCC DR1750 .L57 2019 (print) | DDC 949.74203—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019009076

To my parents, Leopold and Eleanor Lippman

Contents

PRONUNCIATION GUIDE FOR BOSNIAN-CROATIAN-SERBIAN WORDS

GLOSSARY

MAP

INTRODUCTION. THE WAR AND THE CAMPAIGNS FOR RECOVERY

PART I: AFTERMATH OF WAR

1. Postwar Bosnia: A New National Disorder

PART II: OVERVIEW OF THE RETURN MOVEMENT

2. Introduction to Refugee Return

3. Obstacles to Return and Breakthroughs in the Late 1990s

4. Return to Mostar and Other Parts of Herzegovina

PART III: RETURN TO SREBRENICA AND THE CAMPAIGN FOR RECOVERY

5. Postwar Srebrenica

6. Truth and Justice—Another Version of Activism

7. Justice in the Courts

8. Reporting History: Reckoning versus Denial

9. Return and Recovery, Continued: A New Normal in Srebrenica

10. The Economic Life of Postwar Srebrenica

11. Life in Sućeska: Serbs of Srebrenica

12. Elections, Repression, and Resistance

PART IV: PRIJEDOR: GENOCIDE, RETURN, AND APARTHEID

13. War and Postwar Events in Prijedor Municipality

14. Corruption in the Republika Srpska and Prijedor

15. War Crimes Prosecution and Justice in Prijedor

16. Grassroots Activism for Justice in Prijedor

17. The Missing, Kevljani, Survival, Emigration

PART V: ATROCITY REVISIONISM

18. Denial of War Crimes at Srebrenica and Prijedor

EPILOGUE: THE CONDITION OF BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA AND HOPES FOR ACTIVISM

NOTES

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

IN APPRECIATION: LIST OF INTERVIEWEES AND HELPERS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Pronunciation Guide for Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian Words

Consonants. Most consonants are similar to those in English, except for the following modifications:

Vowels. There are five simple vowels and no diphthongs:

Glossary

ABBREVIATIONS

ARBiH. Army of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina

BiH. Bosnia-Herzegovina

DISS. Democratic Initiative of Sarajevo Serbs

DM. Deutschmark

DNS. Democratic People’s Alliance; Prijedor-based party of Marko Pavić, Serb nationalist and collaborator with Milorad Dodik

EU. European Union

HDZ. Croatian Democratic Union

HVO. Croatian Defense Council (Bosnian Croat army)

ICC. International Criminal Court

ICG. International Crisis Group

ICJ. International Court of Justice (World Court)

ICMP. International Commission for Missing Persons

ICRC. International Committee of the Red Cross

ICTY. International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia

IFOR. (UN wartime) Implementation Force

IPTF. (UN) International Police Task Force

IWPR. Institute for War and Peace Reporting

JNA. Yugoslav People’s Army

KM. Konvertabilna marka (convertible mark); Bosnian currency, worth about US$0.60–US$0.70

MICT. Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals, successor to the ICTY; now International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT)

NIOD. Dutch Institute for War Documentation (Nederlands Instituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie)

OHR. Office of the High Representative

OSCE. Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe

PLIP. Property Law Implementation Plan

RRTF. Return and Reconstruction Task Force

RS. Republika Srpska; Serb-controlled entity in postwar Bosnia

SDA. Party of Democratic Action; leading Muslim nationalist party

SDC. Supreme Defense Council of Serbia

SDP. Social Democratic Party; nonnationalist but dominated by secular Muslims

SDS. Serb Democratic Party; Serb nationalist party that led the Serb separatist movement during the war

SFOR. (UN) Stabilization Force

SIPA. State Investigation and Protection Agency; state-level police body

SNSD. Party of Independent Social Democrats; Bosnian Serb nationalist party led by Milorad Dodik

SRRP. Srebrenica Regional Recovery Programme

SRS. Serbian Radical Party

UNDP. United Nations Development Programme

UNHCR. UN High Command for Refugees

UNPROFOR. (Wartime) UN Protection Force

VRS. (Wartime) Army of the Republika Srpska

VOCABULARY AND PROMINENT NAMES

Bosniak. Bosnian Muslim.

Chetnik. World War II Serb royalists and ultranationalists who ultimately collaborated with Nazis to fight Tito’s Partisans; their movement was revived in the 1990s.

Dayton agreement. Peace agreement resulting from negotiations overseen by the United States at Dayton, Ohio, signed in Paris in December 1995. Contains annexes covering refugee return; including the Bosnian constitution; and establishing the OHR and other postwar institutions.

Dragan Čović. Leader of the HDZ, Croat nationalist party.

Mirsad Duratović. Concentration camp survivor, politician, and human rights activist in Prijedor.

Federation. With the Republika Srpska, one of the two entities making up Bosnia-Herzegovina. Formed in 1993 and controlled by Bosnian Croats and Muslims.

Herzegovina. Southern region of Bosnia-Herzegovina, geographically and ethnographically distinct from Bosnia.

Alija Izetbegović (1925–2003). Founder and first president of SDA, Bosnian Muslim nationalist party. Leader of Bosnian government and commander of the ARBiH during the war.

Bakir Izetbegović. Leader of the SDA in the 2010s, son of Alija Izetbegović.

kafana. Coffeehouse, restaurant, drinking place, social venue.

Radovan Karadžić. Serb nationalist founder and wartime leader of the SDS, convicted of genocide and other war crimes.

Željko Komšić. Bosnian Croat, leader of the nonnationalist Democratic Front.

Krajina. Northwest region of Bosnia-Herzegovina (part of both entities), overlapping into Croatia.

Ratko Mladić. Commander in chief of the Bosnian Serb army (VRS); convicted of genocide and other war crimes (pending appeal in 2019).

Hasan Nuhanović. Wartime translator for UNPROFOR in the Srebrenica enclave, author, and activist.

Podrinje. Eastern Bosnia along the Drina River.

pozitivci. People who think and act positively.

Republika Srpska. With the Federation, one of two entities making up Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Ustasha. World War II ultranationalist Croats who collaborated with Nazis in ruling Croatia and part of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Their movement was revived in the 1990s.

Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1997. Map by US Central Intelligence Agency, courtesy of Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, University of Texas Libraries

Introduction

THE WAR AND THE CAMPAIGNS FOR RECOVERY

YUGOSLAVIA SEEMED LIKE A FINE PLACE TO LIVE WHEN I moved there in 1981. People had work without being overworked. There was time to spend with family and neighbors. With a Yugoslav passport it was possible to travel east and west with minimal visa requirements, and people generally had the income and vacation time to do so. They went abroad, and they were happy to return home.

But dark forces lurked behind this apparently pleasant scene, and just a few years later the Yugoslav federation was in a state of violent disintegration. The thousand-year history of Bosnia was thus punctuated in a most dreadful way by the 1992–1995 war, which changed the face of the country forever. By far, the most extensive bloodshed took place in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Many books have been written about that war, but the history of Bosnia did not end in 1995. A struggle is ongoing in Bosnia-Herzegovina, waged by ordinary people against great odds—a struggle for freedom of movement, for equal opportunity in the pursuit of a decent life under peaceful conditions, for a government free of corruption, for the restoration of good relations among the diverse ethnicities, and for justice.

This book is a portrayal of postwar life in Bosnia. It is meant to be more in-depth than the occasional newspaper article and more accessible than the scholarly writing currently available. It is the result of more than two decades of close observation of grassroots human rights campaigns and the struggle for recovery in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

MY CURIOSITY ABOUT OTHER CULTURES LED ME TO settle in Yugoslavia in the early 1980s, a decision that laid the foundation for a lifelong attachment to the language, the country, and the people.

Though my interest began with ethnographic exploration, my activist background led me to get involved in a different way when the country was broken up by war ten years after my first visit. In 1993 I helped put together an organization in Seattle to sponsor a family of refugees who had fled the war. I quickly became close to that family, listening to their stories and trying to imagine the troubles they had lived through.

After the war ended, I went to live in Bosnia for two years. At the beginning of my stay, I volunteered with a small relief agency in Tuzla. There I had the eye-opening experience of meeting survivors from Srebrenica. Looking into the eyes of a widow who has lost all the men in her family is a searing experience.

I also visited Prijedor just as refugee return to that municipality was beginning. I witnessed the transformation of the mostly Muslim town of Kozarac from rubble back into a lovely community facing new, post-return problems.

As I sat with return leaders Emsuda and Osman Mujagić in the garden of one of the few homes left intact in Kozarac, the couple expressed their determination to me. We will rebuild Kozarac, Emsuda said. We built this town together before the war, too. We didn’t wait for the government to build our roads and our water supply system. We will do it again.

Osman added, To us, Kozarac is beautiful, even if it is ruined.¹

I wound up my two-year stay working for the Advocacy Project (a Washington, DC–based human rights organization²) as a field researcher on grassroots human rights campaigns. The movement for refugee return, described in the opening chapters of this book, was the first widespread campaign for recovery in postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina. It lasted for six or seven years and was followed in many return communities around Bosnia by an ongoing campaign against ethnic discrimination. In some places this discrimination still amounts to apartheid.

WITNESSING THE STRUGGLE FOR RECOVERY IN BOSNIA

The main part of this book is a description of the cards that were dealt ordinary Bosnians at the end of the war and a depiction of how those people have responded. The whole story is full of detail, and I can recount only a small part of it.

After four chapters that illustrate the larger postwar situation and discuss the refugee return movement, I concentrate on two places where I have spent significant time over the years: Srebrenica and Prijedor municipality.

In general, if people have heard of Bosnia-Herzegovina, they have heard of Srebrenica—and too often the story stops there. Srebrenica deserves attention, of course. But along with the history of the genocide that was committed there, Srebrenica has also become a place where people are fighting for change. Prijedor is another such place, one where there was above-average refugee return after the war, and it has been the location of some of the most concerted struggles for justice under apartheid-like conditions.

I regret that I am not able to give more space to Stolac, Mostar, Goražde, Bijeljina, Višegrad, and many other places in Bosnia where I have spent time and where people have generously shared their experiences with me. In those places I have met people who are likewise fighting for recovery under particular, local conditions of division and separatism; they all deserve to have their stories told.

During the war, over two million people were displaced or made refugees.³ Somewhat over a million of those people returned home from abroad or from internal displacement, but the return movement was not successful in recreating a multiethnic population in any part of the country. In the places where there was significant return, such as the municipalities of Prijedor, Zvornik, and Mostar, the different ethnicities have lived alongside each other rather than with each other. Nearly one hundred thousand people remained internally displaced as of 2017,⁴ with some seven thousand of those still living in collective centers.⁵

The fate of Bosnia-Herzegovina as a recovering nation and a functional state, one that protects and nurtures its people, is as uncertain as ever. But while corruption and division have been pervasive over the years, it has been possible to view the response of Bosnians with hope, simply because, as I will detail, there has been a recurring, courageous response.

At the same time, corruption and the accompanying economic stalemate prompt both an economic and emotional depression, conditions that drive people to leave Bosnia in ever greater numbers. Ongoing instances of corruption are reported in every newspaper—with each outlet focusing on the transgressions of its ideological adversaries. Hypothetically, if one were to read a broad sample of Bosnian news outlets, one could uncover a well-rounded description of the regime of corruption. Ordinary people are well aware of the problem, but hard put to discover effective ways to resolve it; often, leaving for a more stable country where work is available seems the best option.

In recent years one of the salient points of corruption in the Republika Srpska, for example, has been the complex set of scandals surrounding Bobar Banka and Pavlović Banka and shady deals conducted by then RS president Milorad Dodik. After losses of hundreds of millions of KM, leading to the 2014 closure of Bobar Banka in Bijeljina, some fifteen of the bank’s employees had been arrested by 2017. They were accused of participating in a joint criminal enterprise to make illegal, unsupported loans that cost the entity’s banking sector nearly 125 million KM. Clients of the bank—individuals, corporations, and local governments—lost millions of KM. Between 2014 and 2015 the balance of the banking sector was down more than 100 million KM—posting an 80 million KM loss. Court proceedings against a total of fifteen people accused of organized crime continued throughout 2018.⁶

The shady operations of the Bobar Banka group were possible only with the approval of the highest level of power in Dodik’s regime. By 2016 not only was that bank out of business, but several other top banks in the entity were also going into bankruptcy or, at the least, operating deeply in the red. But no legal process has come close to endangering Dodik’s liberty, as his partners in plunder continue to enrich themselves.

Also in 2016, Bosnian state police arrested the American-based tycoon Slobodan Pavlović, owner of Pavlović Banka of Bijeljina, together with two other bank officials, for financial crimes related to that bank. The three officials were under suspicion of arranging a fictitious loan to then prime minister Dodik for the purchase of a mansion in Belgrade.⁷ Dodik received a loan for 1.5 million KM a year after he bought the mansion, thus prompting suspicion that the loan was a cover-up for a money-laundering maneuver.⁸ Pavlović, a crony of Dodik, managed to remain at liberty.

The ongoing plunder of social wealth is perpetrated by the highest-echelon leaders of the Croats and Muslims as well, though with somewhat less drama and media exposure—and the criminal records of those leaders seem as Teflon-coated as that of Milorad Dodik. On the Croat side, the apparently lifelong supreme leader among Croat nationalists, Dragan Čović, has emerged from one criminal court proceeding after another without a conviction. And on the Bosniak side, scandals and rumors of corruption have dogged nationalists and nonnationalists alike.

There are midlevel and one or two high-profile prosecutors and ministers who have made it clear they know right from wrong and are in favor of prosecuting crooked politicians regardless of their party. But politics prevails, and the sense of the overriding political dynamic in Bosnia-Herzegovina is that multiethnicity still lives mainly at the level of the three ethnonationalist profiteering leaderships. There is tacit cooperation, even amid apparently rancorous election campaigns, to ensure that the elite confound the public and retain their positions.

My portrayal of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the campaigns for postwar recovery takes a turn at the end of the book, where I discuss the problem of war crimes denial and revisionism. The demand for justice requires that the truth be told and that the memory of crimes committed during the war be preserved. For there to be recovery, that memory must not be besmirched by denial and revisionism or consigned to oblivion. And there is a corps of people who are working overtime to generate lies about the war and to distort the truth.

Although the nature of the war is not the heart of this book, what happened in the early 1990s naturally influenced everything that has taken place since then. While I do not consider myself biased, I expect to offend some readers because of my considered positions on the history of the war. Some will be convinced that I take a position against one ethnicity or another, but this is not the case.

I have already used the word genocide, and I assert that the crime was committed not only in Srebrenica but also in other parts of Bosnia during the war. In addition, I agree that war was imposed on Bosnia-Herzegovina through aggression by Serbia and Croatia.

That said, my position on the matter of aggression during the war is more nuanced than that of some analysts. It is very clear that separatists among the Bosnian Serbs could not have prosecuted the war in Bosnia without the material, logistical, and strategic support of the Serbian regime led by Slobodan Milošević, and there is also convincing evidence to show, beyond reasonable doubt, that Croatian president Tuđman’s government gave crucial military and financial support to the Bosnian Croat separatist effort. At the same time, I find compelling reasons to accept that at least in some parts of the country, Bosnians of different ethnicities truly experienced the conflict as a civil war. This will be discussed in subsequent chapters.

The remainder of this introduction gives a very short description of Yugoslavia before the war, followed by a similarly brief outline of wartime events. But first, a few words about terminology.

The three main ethnicities of Bosnia-Herzegovina are known as Croats, Serbs, and Muslims. Generally, Croats are of the Catholic faith or descended from Catholics, and Serbs are of the Orthodox Christian faith or descended from Orthodox believers. As nationalism developed in Bosnia in the nineteenth century, the Catholics and Orthodox Christians gradually took on political identities tied to neighboring Catholic Croatia and Orthodox Serbia, respectively. Gradually, they adopted the ethnopolitical designations of their neighboring co-religionists.

For clarity, common usage generally designates people living in Serbia as Serbians, and their co-religionists living in Bosnia as Bosnian Serbs. Likewise people living in Croatia are generally called Croatians while their co-religionists in Bosnia are called Bosnian Croats.

Unlike the Croats and the Serbs, Bosnian Muslims retained the status of a religious community, as opposed to a political body, well into the twentieth century before their political status as an ethnicity with rights equal to those of other ethnicities was enshrined in law. Terminology that gave the Bosnian Muslims a political name lagged behind this historical development, but this finally changed during the war of the 1990s.

In 1993, the semantic confusion about the ethnicity of Bosnian Muslims was resolved at the official level when Muslim political activists of Bosnia formally adopted the name Bosniak as their own. This name provides a secular ethnic designation that parallels Croat and Serb, tying its bearer to a nation without explicit religious implications. It satisfies those secular Muslims who consider the term Muslim to refer only to religiously observant people.

The word has received mixed acceptance from all sides. There are secular Muslims who oppose the politicization of ethnic or religious identification and insist that members of all three ethnicities are simply Bosnians. There are those who recall that Bosniak, originally a Turkish word, once referred to all Bosnians. And there is a component of antinationalist Muslims who energetically oppose the use of the term Bosniak because they see it as a way of unconscionably forcing Bosnian Muslims into an artificial ethnic corral.

The reader will notice that at times I refer to Bosnian Muslims as Bosniaks and at other times simply as Muslims, as if the names were interchangeable. In common English usage, for the most part they are, but among many in Bosnia-Herzegovina, they are not. I have opted not to take a position on this issue.

In a similar vein, the reader will notice that I sometimes refer to the country in question as Bosnia-Herzegovina, and often just as Bosnia. The two names are primarily geographical and ethnographic designations; in these realms there are significant differences between Bosnia and Herzegovina, even though they have been part of one country since early Ottoman times. Most foreigners simply say Bosnia—but Herzegovinans are proud of their region and their culture, and they insist on the recognition of the special attributes of their identity.

METHODOLOGY

Regarding my research methods, my writing has been based, first of all, on personal relationships with activists and on the interviews and informal conversations that I have conducted with them over many years. I conducted hundreds of formal interviews and also learned about the lives of the survivors and ordinary Bosnians through countless informal conversations.

I regularly visited the staff of local and international nongovernmental organizations, and I visited numerous refugee return settlements from the time that they were rudimentary tent encampments until when they were reconstructed villages and towns. I also periodically consulted with local officials dealing with refugee resettlement and other problems of recovery, and I kept in touch as well with some domestic and international analysts as well.

Added to that has been my ongoing study of available information from such sources as grassroots organizational journals, dozens of books on the war (and the few available on postwar life), and ongoing correspondence with Bosnians when I was not able to be in the country. I have made use of available case history information not only from court trials in the International Criminal Tribune for the former Yugoslavia, but also from relevant trials taking place in Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia.

BEFORE THE WAR

It took Yugoslavia a couple of decades to recover physically and economically from the devastation caused by World War II. By the late 1960s, with urbanization, massive infrastructure development, international aid, and crucial remittances from abroad, the country was in relatively good shape, with a living standard that was the envy of other East European nations.

However, by the mid-1980s the Yugoslav economy was in great distress, as inflation began to go out of control. Massive debts incurred during Tito’s time started to come due, and politicians and bureaucrats failed to salvage the economic order. The country’s constituent republics competed, more and more on an ethnic basis, for scarce resources. Regional representatives to the federal government fought to ensure perks for their constituencies, generating hostility among republics and the ethnicities they represented.

Marshal Tito, lifelong president of Yugoslavia, died in 1980, leaving a power vacuum that responsible leaders were unable to fill. Growing instability provided fertile ground for the surfacing of old animosities and new demagogues. One of the most prominent markers of the breakout of national chauvinism was the 1986 Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences (SANU). The memorandum, in an expression of ethnic nationalism, shrilly articulated a sense of Serbian victimhood and advocated the complete national and cultural integrity of the Serbian people. This was recognizable code language calling for a rearrangement of the constitutional order of Yugoslavia. It was a short step from this rhetoric to the advocacy of a Greater Serbia.⁹

In 1986, the banker Slobodan Milošević engineered a takeover of the Serbian Communist Party, and in the same year he made a belligerent speech in Kosovo exploiting friction between Serbs and Albanians in that province.

The year 1990 saw the first multiparty elections throughout Yugoslavia, resulting in the endorsement of nationalist parties in all republics. By then, the Yugoslav Communist Party had disbanded, and the only institution holding the country together was the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA), which was dominated, for historical reasons, by Serbian officers.*¹ The officer corps of the JNA was already recorded as 60 percent Serb in 1983, with a greater percentage of Serbs taking the high command positions.¹⁰

The ethnic Serb domination of the army was made all but complete when, in the early 1990s, nationalists under the leadership of Slobodan Milošević were making preparations to take control of a large part of Yugoslavia. By the end of the war in Croatia in late 1991, Milošević was reshaping the JNA to ensure that it was controlled by officers known to be loyal to the idea of a Greater Serbia.¹¹

In Bosnia-Herzegovina, three new political parties had formed: the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS), the Croatian Democratic Alliance (HDZ), and the Bosniak-dominated Party of Democratic Action (SDA). Each of these ascendant parties retained elements of the authoritarian, centralist political culture of the earlier period.

Ethnic politics filled the vacuum left by a vanished Yugoslav patriotism, as citizens who had previously identified and voted as Bosnians or Yugoslavs gravitated to the party representing their ethnicity. Leaders of each ethnic group rushed for the political openings created by the introduction of multiparty politics, and each leader told a story of his own constituency’s victimization. One extremism answered another; Croat, Serb, and Bosniak representatives each inspired their followers with talk of past injuries and future greatness.

Serbian expansionists called for the annexation of Serb-populated areas of Bosnia and Croatia; likewise, Croatian expansionists strove for annexation of Croat-populated areas of Bosnia. During the 1990 Croatian electoral campaign, presidential candidate Franjo Tuđman, as described by the writer Lenard Cohen, emphasized the special ties between Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina and suggested that it might become necessary to raise the question of the republic’s territorial reorganization in future negotiations about the restructuring of Yugoslavia along confederal lines.¹² As soon as such map-based resolutions arose, a free-for-all competition for control of territory became the imperative.

In Bosnia, leading up to the November 1990 elections, Serbs agitated in the predominantly Serb-populated areas, and Croat nationalists organized in Croat-majority parts of the country. Each ethnicity created local nationalist party organizations in all areas where they had any significant representation. Political polarization was accompanied by heightened rhetoric, threats, and sporadic violence.

The wars of Yugoslav dissolution began in earnest in June 1991, when Slovenia and Croatia declared secession from Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav National Army (JNA) responded with a halfhearted attempt to take control of Slovenia, a venture that lasted only ten days before the army withdrew. A genuine war, however, ensued in Croatia. By late summer, Serb militias, with the backing of the JNA, had taken control of a third of Croatia.

The militias and JNA played cooperative roles, each reinforcing the other body’s work. From the point of view of the Serb extremists in Croatia, the creation of independent paramilitary groupings was essential to the initiation of separatist actions because, at the beginning of the hostilities, the public still viewed the JNA as the army of all Yugoslavs—an institution that existed to safeguard the entire population and to preserve the integrity of the Yugoslav federation. Thus the war in Croatia commenced with sporadic paramilitary actions, and a pattern developed wherein the JNA would intervene after such incidents. The goal of the intervention was presented as simply to restore order, but the pattern showed that the JNA consistently reinforced the separatist goals of the Serb militias.

The international community wavered in its policies with regard to the breakup of Yugoslavia, sometimes encouraging one side, sometimes the other. Although signs of turbulence in Yugoslavia had been evident at least since 1987, Europe and the United States were caught unprepared when the violence began. International officials gave lip service to the protection of minorities within each republic without exerting significant leverage to reinforce their message. Finally, toward the end of 1991 Germany recognized the independence of Slovenia and Croatia; the European Community (EC) followed suit in January 1992. The United States held back.*²

By early 1992 there was little prospect for reconciliation among separatist forces in Bosnia. In December 1991, President Alija Izetbegović applied to the European Community for recognition of Bosnia as an independent state. The EC responded by requesting that Bosnia hold a referendum on independence; the government of Bosnia scheduled this for the end of February 1992.

Nationalist Serb leaders called on Bosnian Serbs to refrain from participating in the referendum. The Serbs had already held their own referendum in November 1991, resulting in a strong vote in favor of Bosnia remaining part of Yugoslavia. They announced the formation of their own republic in December and formalized this entity with the January 9 establishment of the Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, later renamed the Republika Srpska (RS), the Serb Republic.

When the referendum was held on February 29 and March 1, 1992, the Serbs, constituting over 30 percent of Bosnia’s population, in large part obeyed the call to boycott. However, there was very strong Croat and Bosniak turnout, with about 65 percent of the total electorate voting. Approximately 99 percent voted in favor of Bosnian independence.¹³ On April 6, the European Community, followed by the United States, recognized the independence of Bosnia-Herzegovina. But if Western officials expected that this move would prevent war, it was too late.

WAR

In the spring of 1992 an assault by Serb separatist units, backed up by the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA), began in several parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina almost simultaneously. Military groupings instituted a reign of terror, killing or expelling the non-Serb population.

For the first couple of months of the war in Bosnia, the cooperation between local Serb militias and the JNA replicated that of the war in Croatia; Serb paramilitaries attacked non-Serb communities, and the JNA intervened to restore order but reinforced the ethnic cleansing carried out by the Serb militias. By May 1992, the JNA had officially withdrawn from Bosnia, but to a large extent this involved leaving the Bosnian Serb portion of its staff and ranks in place with new insignia, under the control of the Army of the Republika Srpska (VRS). Logistical, financial, and material support continued to flow from Serbia.

Serb separatists took over the entire eastern part of Bosnia, save a few enclaves. Srebrenica, Žepa, and Goražde held out, and thousands of refugees from the rest of the region fled to those places. In this same period, Serb forces conquered the northern part of Bosnia as well, and much of central Bosnia. By midsummer 1992, 70 percent of Bosnia was under Serb control,¹⁴ and by the fall, over two million people had been displaced.¹⁵ Tuzla, Sarajevo, part of central Bosnia, and western Herzegovina remained under Bosniak and Croat control.

The result of Serb military operations was to create ethnically homogenous zones under Serb control. The process of enforced displacement quickly came to be known as ethnic cleansing, a euphemism for forced population transfer (at times accompanied by genocide) based on ethnicity. The separation of people of different ethnicities, who had been living side by side for centuries, was one of the main goals of the war.

Sarajevo came under siege, surrounded by Serb forces that shelled the city and subjected its residents to sniper fire. There were days when a particularly harsh atrocity punctuated the passage of time. One of these was the first Markale massacre. On February 5, 1994, a bomb fell on that crowded market as people were buying and selling, killing more than sixty-five people and wounding hundreds.

In mid-1992, news broke of Serb-run concentration camps. Journalists released chilling stories of brutality at several camps near Prijedor. British and American journalists managed to enter Omarska, a mine complex near Prijedor, and the nearby Trnopolje camp. With the news of the concentration camps, Western public opinion was shocked into awareness of the atrocities taking place in Bosnia. There followed a series of conferences, peace plans, and negotiations that would, for the next three years, nevertheless do next to nothing to save Bosnia.

SREBRENICA AND THE ENCLAVES

By mid-1992, Serb forces created dozens of concentration camps and expelled hundreds of thousands of non-Serbs from areas under their control. The military situation remained static in most parts of the country, except for the eastern territory around Srebrenica, Žepa, and Goražde. These enclaves were stumbling blocks in the Serbian plan to annex a geographically compact area to Serbia or, at the very least, have it function with de facto independence from the rest of Bosnia.

Bosniak forces in the eastern enclaves mounted resistance to the Serb siege. The military structure of Bosniak defense in the enclaves was formed in an ad hoc way, with commanders taking authority based on their personal following. Prominent among these leaders was Naser Orić, a young ex-policeman. Early in the war, he became one of the leading commanders in the Srebrenica area.

In the Srebrenica enclave, Orić fought to expand territory under government control. In the fall and winter of 1992 he came close to breaking through to the Bosniak/Croat-controlled area around Tuzla, to the northwest of Srebrenica. By January 1993, nine hundred square kilometers of territory had come under Bosniak control.¹⁶ The enclave reached from the Drina to within five miles of the Tuzla front line.

During this period, the people of Srebrenica and its surrounding villages were usually hungry. Emir Suljagić, a young local translator for international officials, described the town as being so crowded with refugees that thousands were sleeping in the streets. Conditions were worse in the town than in the surrounding villages, where people could at least find some wild food and occasionally cultivate a garden.

At the beginning of the war, Serbs living in Srebrenica left or were driven out of the Bosniak-controlled enclave, just as Bosniaks were expelled from the surrounding areas. Periodically Naser Orić would lead forays against the Serb villages on the periphery of the enclave. On these occasions, civilians would follow the army and take whatever food they could find. Bosniak troops and civilians alike participated in assaults against Serb civilians. One particularly notorious attack on Serb civilians was perpetrated in January 1993 in the village of Kravica.

Some hundreds of Serb soldiers and civilians were killed as Orić fought to unite the enclave with government-controlled territory. The Serb forces that controlled most of eastern Bosnia were determined to prevent this from taking place. In February 1993, Bosnian Serb commander General Ratko Mladić launched a counteroffensive against Srebrenica.

Within a short time, Serb forces recovered most of the territory that Orić had taken over. The Serb offensive threatened over forty-five thousand people who were trapped in the Srebrenica enclave. At this point, aware of the desperate siege conditions in the east, the UN Security Council declared Srebrenica a safe area. Bosniak troops within the enclave were required to surrender their weapons, and in return an UNPROFOR (UN Protective Force) contingent would establish bases in the enclave, intended to deter attacks from the surrounding Serbs. The concept of a safe area or UN protected zone, though, was never thoroughly defined.

A small, rotating contingent of international troops established the UNPROFOR base in Srebrenica town and several observation posts around the enclave, eventually staffed by a Dutch battalion (Dutchbat). A UN Security Council resolution attempted to define UNPROFOR’s role in the enclave, promising that the UN was going to defend the population against attack by the surrounding Serb forces. The resolution further authorized UNPROFOR, acting in self-defense, to take the necessary measures, including the use of force, in reply to bombardments against the safe areas by any of the parties or to armed incursion into them or in the event of any deliberate obstruction in or around those areas to the freedom of movement of the Force or of protected humanitarian convoys. This language seemed clearly to promise the defense of Srebrenica by UN forces.¹⁷

Hasan Nuhanović, another translator for UN forces in Srebrenica, said, At every meeting where I was translator, the question was posed, ‘How do you think you will defend this place in case of attack?’ The answer was, NATO airplanes are covering the skies of Bosnia, and they can arrive at the ‘protected zone’ within two to three minutes after our call, and eliminate any attacking formation.¹⁸

THE CROAT-BOSNIAK WAR

In the summer of 1992, Bosnian president Izetbegović and Croatian president Tuđman formalized an alliance between government and Croat forces, but it was not to hold for long, as tensions between Bosniaks and Croats grew. A year into the war, fighting broke out between the two forces on several fronts.

Asked to sort out the origins of the Croat-Bosniak conflict, writer Željko Ivanković said, The Croats and the Bosniaks fought for their self-interest. One part of the Croats, led by Mate Boban, fought for Tuđman’s expansionist goals and for a Greater Croatia. But some fought in self-defense, to protect their own homes. Then there were Croats in some places such as Usora, and Tuzla, where they fought together with the Bosniaks against the Serbs.¹⁹

In April 1993, fighting between Bosnian Croat armed units called the Croatian Defense Council (HVO) and the government army (the ARBiH—Army of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina) broke out in full force, starting in several towns in central Bosnia. Within a couple of months after the onset of the fighting, the towns and villages of central Bosnia had been divided up in a patchwork between Croat and Bosniak forces.

In mid-April the HVO committed a massacre in the village of Ahmići as part of an ethnic cleansing campaign in the Lašva valley. There were war crimes committed by Bosniak forces as well, including expulsions, arson, rape, and killing of civilians. Bosniaks ethnically cleansed several dozen Croat villages in the summer of 1993.²⁰ They committed massacres in the Croat villages of Križ and Uzdol, and Bosniak soldiers murdered two Catholic priests at a monastery in Fojnica.

The Croats of central Bosnia fared the worst in this part of the conflict, as they came to be the victims simultaneously of the HDZ’s aggressive policy and of the Bosniaks’ war goals. When the conflict was played out, tens of thousands of Croats had been expelled from central Bosnia, to end up as displaced persons in Croat-controlled Herzegovina or as refugees in Croatia and beyond. Much of this movement was the result of Bosniak attacks on the Croat population. It was also the result of the Croat policy of humane resettlement, a euphemism concocted by aides of Croatian president Franjo Tuđman.²¹

The movement of Croats into western Herzegovina and the expulsion of Muslims from that region was part of a plan to establish a Croat-controlled statelet called Herceg-Bosna. It is probable that the long-term intention was to annex Herceg-Bosna to Croatia.

During the summer of 1993 the HVO drove Bosniaks out of towns and villages throughout western Herzegovina; many of these people ended up in east Mostar. Bombarded by the HVO, east Mostar became a Bosniak enclave under siege. The prewar population of that part of the city was estimated at ten thousand; by mid-1993 at least fifty-five thousand people were crammed into the besieged area, suffering from increasing hunger.²² People were being killed or wounded by bombs and snipers every day. The situation was described as being worse than that of Sarajevo.²³

After the war, suspected Muslim war criminals and Croat separatists and military leaders of the HVO were put on trial at The Hague for a variety of war crimes. Of these trials, the most prominent, widespread, and drawn out one was that of Prlić et al., the prosecution of six prominent Croat separatists for forced deportation of Bosniaks, along with detention, torture, murder, and the use of civilians as human shields and for slave labor, among other things. After a first-instance conviction of the six in 2013, an appeal resulted in confirmation of the initial judgment in late 2017.²⁴

By the spring of 1994, military developments made a significant change in the trajectory of the war possible. Bosniak forces had begun to win victories against the Croats on the battlefield, especially in central Bosnia. Meanwhile Western officials put pressure on Croatia to halt support of Bosnian Croat separatists. Croat and Bosniak representatives went to Washington to work out a cease-fire agreement.

The Washington Agreement of spring 1994 ended the fighting between the Croats and Bosniaks and, at least on a formal level, re-created the alliance between the two parties that had existed at the beginning of the war. However, the relationship had been changed permanently. Two-way ethnic cleansing in Herzegovina and central Bosnia was all but complete, with at least eighty thousand Croats and Bosniaks displaced in that region.²⁵

With Croat and Muslim forces cooperating, the route was opened for an eventual tipping of the military balance against the Serbs. The Washington Agreement also created a Croat- and Bosniak-controlled Federation of the territories controlled by the respective forces. A new military/political reality was born.

CORRUPTION IN WAR

It is critical to introduce the fact of wartime corruption here, because it is the root of the dynamics that have flourished in Bosnian-Herzegovinan politics to this day. As the war continued, a regime of corruption flourished. There was potential for profiteering at many levels, from that of the petty smuggler up to the high political echelon. The new elite, engaged vigorously in implementing ethnic cleansing, was at the same time involved in enriching itself.

Whether the plunder and corruption were end goals or secondary but inevitable to wartime dynamics is open to discussion. There has been a spectrum of motivations; for some people involved in the war, the establishment of a Greater Serbia or a Greater Croatia was paramount. It would not be accurate to accuse Slobodan Milošević, nor many of his high-level collaborators in the Serbian political and military infrastructure, of working simply to enrich themselves. After all Milošević and his family, for example, were already quite well situated, with their millions pocketed away in secret bank accounts in Cyprus and Switzerland.²⁶

It would be more appropriate to describe Milošević’s motive as the desire for increased power. As has been the case with leaders before and after Milošević, reinforcing one’s power often turns out to be the only way to stay out of prison. Other military and political leaders involved in the Yugoslav wars were similarly motivated by lust for power, but also, at times, by a seriously misplaced sense of patriotism colored by national chauvinism. It tended to be the lower commanders who took advantage of opportunities to smuggle goods or engage in plunder; the higher-level leaders had more refined ways of enriching themselves.

In any case, the massive transfer of wealth from ordinary citizens to all manner of profiteers, war criminals, and political leaders commenced during the war and continued in the postwar period. From the beginning of the war the dynamic of corruption was in force throughout Bosnia-Herzegovina; for military leaders on all sides, killing and getting rich often went together.

Describing the development of an alliance between criminals and the new state, the Sarajevo journalist Gojko Berić wrote, [The war’s] character was determined by mass gangsterism against civilians and general plunder. The war . . . brought onto the public stage thousands of killers and violent robbers. It was their war, the occasion they’d been waiting for. Yesterday’s riff-raff, headed by local nationalist leaders, were given the chance to vent their brutal energy. At the head of the gangster lines were the people who had thought up, organized and led the whole thing. Cloaked in the mantle of State and Nation, they all reeked of blood.²⁷

Munir Alibabić, wartime head of Sarajevo’s Central Intelligence Service, wrote about dishonest practices among police and officials in the Sarajevo government. He noted an oligarchic group that acted as a team, divided up property and powers without regard to rights, mainly keeping goods for themselves: real estate, merchandise, position, and travels.²⁸ These practices took place while thousands of honest Sarajevans fought and died to protect their city. Alibabić termed the dishonest regime a mafiocracy.

WHILE THIS PASSAGE HAS FOCUSED ON PERSONAL enrichment and other motives for the killing spree that was the Bosnian war, it is important to note the role of genocide in the overall wartime picture. Whether Tuđman or Milošević set out to exterminate the members of another ethnicity, in whole or in part, is up for debate; it is demonstrable that either of these leaders would have been satisfied to annex significant territories of Bosnia-Herzegovina and to subjugate or expel vast numbers of members of the target ethnonational groups. It is equally clear that military commanders and some political leaders, such as Radovan Karadžić, Ratko Mladić, and Mate Boban, among others, were avidly and intentionally involved in the mass targeting of Muslims for murder. In any case, while there was a spectrum of motivations for the aggression against Bosnia-Herzegovina, genocide was one of the outcomes.

MOVING TOWARD THE END

Throughout the war, the inhabitants of Bosnia-Herzegovina lived through cycles of desperation, false hope, and disappointment. The front line changed little after the early months of the war. The eastern enclaves remained under siege, and Serb forces continued to expel Bosniaks and Croats from areas that they controlled. However, there were certain developments that would bring the war to an end in the course of 1995.

After the creation of the Croat-Bosniak Federation in the summer of 1994, a new peace plan was drafted by a Contact Group composed of the United States, France, Germany, Great Britain, and Russia. The plan proposed to allot 49 percent of Bosnia-Herzegovina to the Serbs, and the rest would go to the Federation.

Although the Contact Group’s proposed map gave Srebrenica, Žepa, and Goražde to the Federation, geography and military logic worked against such an arrangement, and many international officials recognized this. By early 1995, members of the US administration had more or less given up on preserving the eastern enclaves, and they were considering a land trade.²⁹ Bosniak leaders saw the problem as well, although none of them was willing to openly propose giving up the enclaves. Early in 1995 President Izetbegović had told US negotiator Richard Holbrooke that he knew that all three eastern enclaves were not viable and would have to be given up.³⁰

For three years after the establishment of the safe area, there was an uneasy standoff between the huddled residents of Srebrenica and surrounding Serb forces. Although a condition for UNPROFOR protection of the enclave was the handover of firearms owned by the Muslims, residents turned in their less useful weapons and kept what they could. And as the reach of the safe area was ill defined—both geographically and in the sense of UNPROFOR’s responsibility—units of the Army of Bosnia-Herzegovina were able to operate defensively on the periphery of the enclave. However, after the spring of 1993 their struggle was for survival, not for expansion or breakout of the enclave.

In March 1995, for reasons that have never been explained, Naser Orić’s superiors in Sarajevo ordered him to leave the enclave. This was a serious blow to the Bosniaks’ defense of the enclave, because Orić’s leadership was a critical factor in promoting cohesion among the local troops.

Determined to hasten the outcome of the war in 1995, Serb leaders increased pressure on Srebrenica early in the year. In April and May, Serb forces intensified bombardment of some of the settled areas on the edges of the enclave. Their encroachment on the enclave escalated in June 1995, when Serb forces took over all of Dutchbat’s southern observation posts one by one. The Muslim population and its lightly armed soldiers fully expected that the UN was going to defend the enclave and drive back the advancing army; without antitank weapons or an air force, there was no other possible salvation. But during critical days in early July, NATO did not appear. The enclave fell on the eleventh of July.

Many writers have concluded that responsibility for the capture of Srebrenica does not fall squarely on the Dutch. In Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation, one of the most authoritative books on the breakup of Yugoslavia, the authors declare, The Dutch had done what they could. . . . They were poorly placed to do anything to halt the offensive that was taking place.³¹

This statement seems logical, given the small number of Dutch troops present in the enclave, and it is true that the Dutch are not alone in their responsibility for the fall of Srebrenica. However, the book was written at the end of the war, when much information had not yet become available, at least not to most foreigners. In 2005, Hasan Nuhanović published his book Under the UN Flag. This book focuses on the actions of Dutchbat in Srebrenica, and it demolishes the assertion that the Dutch did what they could. Under the UN Flag describes in painful detail the steps Dutch authorities took throughout their stay in the enclave that undermined the Bosniak defense. In many instances, Dutchbat went overboard to thwart the Bosniak defense, thus making the Serb takeover easier.

Nuhanović relates that on various occasions, Dutch troops prevented the Bosniaks from constructing defensive positions in the southern part of enclave. They stopped the army from digging trenches near the boundaries of the enclave and at times even filled them in.³² Between 1993 and 1995, when the Serb army took over parts of the enclave that were important for its defense, the Dutch did not react. Periodically, they confiscated weapons from Bosniak soldiers who were trying to patrol the periphery. And during the Serb offensive, the Dutch also refrained from defending their own positions that the Serbs fired on.³³ When the enclave fell, as Dutch soldiers evacuated their observation posts they consistently handed over their weapons to the Serbs.³⁴ The behavior of Dutchbat helped Srebrenica fall.

As the fall of the enclave came closer, its population divided into two groups. Most men of fighting age embarked on an overland trek toward government-controlled territory around Tuzla. Women, children, and the elderly moved toward Potočari, a suburb several kilometers to the north of Srebrenica town, hoping to find safety at the Dutchbat headquarters. By the time Serb forces arrived in Srebrenica on the afternoon of July 11, some twenty-five thousand people were streaming into Potočari. The Dutch opened a section of fencing on the side of their base in order to allow people to enter. Around five thousand people were let in; then, the Dutch welded shut the opening, saying that the base was becoming overcrowded.

Twenty thousand terrified people were left stranded on the road and in the fields surrounding the base. Hasan Nuhanović reported that the Dutch concern about overcrowding was fraudulent, because there was much space that could have housed more refugees.³⁵

The evacuation of the crowds around the Dutchbat base proceeded quickly. By two days after the fall of the enclave, the Serbs had removed most of the refugees who had not been admitted to the base, separating out the men of fighting age and sending them off to be killed. Serb officers then directed the Dutch to allow the evacuation of the roughly five thousand people located on their base. Some Dutch soldiers cooperated with the evacuation, even though they were aware of the killings that had been taking place around the base. Some individual Dutch soldiers objected to the separation and expulsion, but they were powerless.³⁶

Hasan Nuhanović mentions several reasonable actions that the Dutch could have taken to save lives. Immediately upon taking over Srebrenica, General Mladić requested that the Dutch supply vehicles to remove the Bosniak population. When there was no response forthcoming from the Dutch, Serb troops took over this task, making the separations and abuse more likely.³⁷ Nuhanović points out that a UN-coordinated convoy from other parts of Bosnia could have transported the refugees in a secure manner.

The men captured at Potočari were driven to the nearby town of Bratunac and confined in a warehouse. Meanwhile, a column of ten thousand to fifteen thousand men had set out from the enclave through the woods toward Tuzla. Around a third of them were armed. These men, accompanying Srebrenica’s military and political leaders, headed the column. The march was to be a hideous experience that the majority of the men would not survive.

The column proceeded through the woods slowly, short on food, water, and sleep. Men became disoriented and wandered in circles. The Serb army ambushed the unarmed middle and rear portions of the column several times and captured large numbers of men. The captured men were taken in groups and gunned down in summary executions and then buried in mass graves. Larger groups of captives were taken to collection points and killed. Over a thousand men were mowed down by automatic weapons and grenades in a warehouse in Kravica. The final phase of the atrocity was under way.

The vanguard of the column managed to fight its way through Serb troops near the front lines, and it reached free territory in less than ten days. Other people straggled in after a few weeks or even months, having lost their way, or simply having waited for a safe time to cross through dangerous territory. At most, only around five or six thousand men arrived safely.

THE CROATIAN OFFENSIVE IN THE KRAJINA

Launching Operation Storm in August 1995, the Croatian army attacked Serb forces occupying the Croatian Krajina, part of a region that stretched from northwestern Bosnia westward across the border into Croatia. The entire Croatian Krajina fell within three days. The largest single expulsion of the war ensued, with at least two hundred thousand Croatian Serbs fleeing eastward along routes that the Croatian army had left open. Some Croatian soldiers committed war crimes against the civilian population. Around twenty thousand Serb homes were looted and burned.³⁸ Elderly Serbs who had chosen to remain in their centuries-old homeland were murdered by the dozens, and, in some instances, Croatian forces bombarded the roads on which Serb refugees were fleeing.³⁹

The combined Croatian, Bosnian Croat, and Muslim forces then began to take back control of part of the Bosnian territories conquered by Serb forces three years earlier. By a week into August, the military balance of the war in Bosnia had turned. Serbian ambitions to create a Greater Serbia, all the way across northern and western Bosnia and into Croatia, were curtailed.

On August 28, Serb forces launched a bomb into Sarajevo that landed on the Markale open-air market where, eighteen months before, a similar attack had caused a gruesome massacre. The second Markale massacre was a shock to a newly sensitized world and served as the pretext for the ensuing NATO intervention. NATO’s bombing soon forced the end of the siege of Sarajevo, and a final cease-fire came into force October 12, 1995. The next step was to prepare for the Dayton peace conference, to be held in Ohio in November.

THE DAYTON PEACE AGREEMENT

To a large extent, the negotiations at Dayton enshrined wartime territorial acquisitions as they stood in late 1995; these facts on the ground, together with the Contact Group’s 51/49 percent agreement, dictated the Dayton map. The Dayton peace agreement (officially titled The General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina) recognized the territorial and political division of Bosnia into two entities in that territorial ratio: the Serb-controlled Republika Srpska, and the Croat-and Bosniak-controlled Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The RS was granted 49 percent of Bosnia’s territory, and the Federation received the rest—excluding Brčko, which was later decreed a District.

A new constitution was promulgated as Annex 4 of the peace agreement. The constitution set up a state where its subjects were defined as Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, and Others. In this way Bosnia-Herzegovina became a state where people’s political rights were tied to their ethnicity.⁴⁰ The enshrining of ethnic differences as a constitutional factor contributed to cementing the wartime ethnic divisions. The Republika Srpska was understood to be the Serb entity, and the Federation was a place for Bosniaks and Croats.*³

Annex 7 of the Dayton agreement provided for freedom of movement and for return of displaced persons to their prewar homes. But there was no guarantee that the return called for under Annex 7 could take place. Dayton also established the Office of the High Representative (OHR), an international envoy with governing powers over Bosnia. The OHR was designed to be a guiding administrator, rather than a commanding one, in the hope that in peacetime there would be a strong desire among Bosnian leaders to re-create a unified nation and a functional state. It was an illusory hope.

The Dayton constitution bequeathed most political power to the ethnically dominated entities. At the state level, voters were to be represented by a three-member presidency, composed of a Croat, a Serb, and a Bosniak. The Serb was to be selected in the Republika Srpska, and the Croat and Bosniak members of the presidency were elected in the Federation. This disenfranchisement of Serbs in the Federation and of Croats and Bosniaks in the RS was a reflection of the fact that, under Dayton, Serbs had constitutional protection, or constituent status, only in the RS, and Croats and Bosniaks only in the Federation. The fact that this built-in discrimination flouted international rights conventions that were also enshrined in the Dayton constitution was but one of many internal, self-defeating contradictions of the document.⁴¹

The competencies of the central state were limited by Dayton to such spheres as foreign policy, foreign trade, customs enforcement, monetary policy, and immigration. The resulting power arrangement was one in which the entities took on the character of autonomous statelets, while the central authority remained essentially powerless, especially regarding domestic policy. The Federation’s unity was symbolic as well, since the territory that had come to be controlled by Croat separatists during the war continued to be dominated by those wartime leaders and their political heirs. The resulting postwar Bosnian state, deformed by partition, has been pithily described as a legal fiction, or a customs union with a foreign ministry.⁴²

The Banja Luka artist Alojz Čurić characterized the Dayton setup in a more colorful manner, saying, This is a traffic accident in the United Nations, an unnatural division. The system of two entities reminds me of a monster, a Hollywood creation. There should be decentralization along regional, not political lines: Herzegovina, the Krajina, Semberija, and other parts Bosnia; this unnatural, pathological Bosnia-Herzegovina can’t go to Europe.⁴³

But Čurić provided a metaphor for Bosnia that echoed many people’s expectations: Bosnia is a phoenix. More than one Bosnian has said to me, We have outlived all previous occupations; we will recover from this as well.

The postwar period was to be characterized by a struggle to survive what was possibly the greatest threat in Bosnia’s thousand-year history: the division of the country as ratified by Dayton.

Notes

*¹ The predominance of Serbs was the case because, first of all, during World War II there was a higher percentage of Serb soldiers among the ultimately victorious Partisans than of other ethnicities, and throughout the postwar period there was likewise a predominance—or at least a plurality—of Serbs in the Communist Party.

One factor contributing to the high proportion of Serbs in federal politics and in the military was that positions in these institutions were delegated by republic rather than by ethnicity. Each ethnicity, other than the Serbs, was primarily located in one republic (Croats in Croatia, Macedonians in Macedonia, and so on). However, there were significant Serb populations in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in Croatia. So in these two republics and in Montenegro, high officials in politics and in the army